Microfluidics is a branch of engineering that deals with small quantities of fluids, (for example, nano or pico liters). A lab-on-a-chip (LoC) is one type of microfluidic device that enables miniaturization and integration of biological and chemical analyses to a single chip comprising a variety of channels, valves, mixers, heaters, separators, and sensors. These miniature instruments appear to offer the rare combination of faster, cheaper, and higher-precision analyses compared to conventional bench-scale methods.
Using these devices, molecules, fluids, and cells have been manipulated with precision and accuracy not achieved before. LoCs have been designed for applications in diverse domains such as proteomics, genomics, biochemistry, virology, chemical synthesis, and cell biology which are of interest to chemical, pharmaceutical, environmental and security monitoring, clinical diagnostics and food industries as well as to academic researchers in life sciences.
To date, LoCs have been designed as application-specific lab-on-a-chip (ASLoC) where a new LoC is designed for every assay by creating and connecting on-chip hardware components to match the steps of the assay, which is the detailed step-by-step specification of a particular analysis (i.e., assays are fluidic algorithms). This application-specific approach has two limitations. First, there is considerable design effort, turn-around time, and cost. Performing an experiment requires the time-consuming process of designing, fabricating, and testing a chip before conducting the actual experiment. This prolonged cycle can take months to complete, increasing effort and cost and reducing productivity. Similarly, minor modifications to an assay protocol re-incur the overheads of the design cycle. Second, the tight coupling between the LoC and the assay reduces the productivity of both LoC users (e.g., biologists, chemists, and drug developers) and LoC engineers by requiring cross-disciplinary knowledge (i.e., the engineers must know the assay details and the users need to know the constraints of the specific LoC technology).
There is a need to reduce or eliminate significant design effort, turn-around time, and cost, as well as designer degradation and user productivity through a programmable microfluidic device that can be programmed to run many assays. The invention satisfies this need.